Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 6 (1925-06).djvu/91

426 scrambled among the contents of the chest. He drew out a small hand-ax and a long spike. With one powerful blow he drove the pointed nail through the bony hand, deep into the adobe of the wall.

Beads of black blood trickled down and spattered in the dust below. Mortal agony twisted and distorted the pock-marked face of Theodor, and sharp rasping cries issued from the swollen mouth. Another blow, in strange unison with the beat of the tom-tom, pinioned the other arm. The legs dangled; the body writhed in the throes of approaching death. The skinny legs were drawn apart. Again, and yet again, rose and fell the fatal ax. There was a gritting sound, such as is made by the surgeon’s saw, when the cruel spikes pierced the bones of the feet.

''“Vive Theodor! Vive Theodor!”'' shrieked the demoniacal mob.

Mortal man could not long survive such inhuman torture. Slowly the head sank down upon the scrawny chest; the eyes bulged from their sockets. The cooling blood had ceased to flow and now merely oozed from around the nails.

Grasping the disheveled hair with his left hand, the black straightened up the bowed head. The ax ascended once more and there was a sickening thud as it fell upon the distended leaders of the bare throat.

mob slunk back as the gory head dropped to the street, rolled a few feet, stood upright on the bloody stub of the neck. As the glazing eyeballs fixed in the cold stare of death, there issued from the purple lips a scarcely audible murmur:

“Today, Papillon, today!”

Had Black Oscar been yet among the living, he alone, of all that multitude, would have noted how strangely these words from dead lips appeared an answer to the words from other dead lips, once sadly murmured at dead of night, in the domed council chamber of the palace.